


the rise and temporary fall of lily evans

by punkrockbadger



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Desi Potters, Gen, Grief/Mourning, James and Harry die AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2016-01-12
Packaged: 2018-05-13 11:26:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5705950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkrockbadger/pseuds/punkrockbadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, Lily Evans forgets how to breathe. She’ll see a messy mop of black hair on a tall, lean frame, or a little boy with green eyes yelling as he sprints down the street, and her lungs will constrict. Have her boys come back to her? She knows, better than anyone else, that they have not. They will not.</p><p>Her boys have been gone for years now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the rise and temporary fall of lily evans

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry.

Sometimes, Lily Evans forgets how to breathe. She’ll see a messy mop of black hair on a tall, lean frame, or a little boy with green eyes yelling as he sprints down the street after his dog, and her lungs will constrict. Have her boys come back to her? She knows, better than anyone else, that they have not. They will not.

Her boys have been gone for years now.

Sometimes, it feels like they’re sitting on her shoulders, her son and her husband, weighing her down with their heavy memories. It would explain, then, why one of her shoulders always feels lighter than the other, why she always feels unbalanced. She lives with the reminder that her son never really had a life, never really made memories he would’ve remembered fondly as an adult. He never had anything that counted, because she couldn’t save him. James, James at least tried, but she didn’t, and now she’s alive, and Harry will never even be one and a half.

He would be ten, now, it occurs to her, and she looks for him in the bright eyed faces of her science class. Imagines him sitting in the front row, every teacher's dream, with James’ dark brown skin, and her green eyes, and a pair of glasses perched crookedly on his nose, because of course he’d need glasses. She imagines her smile stretching his lips, and James’ laugh roaring out of his mouth, and thinks of Harry, full of so much love that he’s nearly bursting at the seams. 

But, as much as she imagines, he will never be real. He will forever be the empty desk in the back of a teacher’s desk, a name that should’ve been called at attendance but won’t be. Every time she has to call out the name Harry, and see a child who is not her son smile at the sound of their name as they raise their hand, she regrets giving her son such a common name.

Her husband had spun her stories of meanings, told her that the names they were giving him were strong and good and would see him through to do great things, and she allows herself a second of bitterness. She allows herself a second to hate James Potter, as she used to when they were children, for being an arrogant, lying prick. He believed so intensely in things getting better. He put his whole heart into the idea that they would come out unscathed, and, she thinks with a smirk, that died with him. She shouldn’t have focused her effort on deflating his head. Maybe his heart, his stupid heart that kept seeing the good in everything, should’ve been her first target. 

She’d seen signs of that heart in Harry as well, in whatever way a fifteen month old could show them. She’d seen it in the way he always shared his cereal in the mornings, sleep soft smile shining in his eyes, in the way he’d refuse to sleep until he’d made her smile first, in the way he’d let both of his parents play with his favorite toys without complaint. If Harry had grown up, she thinks, he would be just like his father, driven by that intense, all consuming need to fix everything and everyone that Lily had fallen for, more recently than it felt like. 

He would be the nice boy on the playground that helps you tie your shoes, or the one that helps you organize your papers after you’ve dropped them. She sees other kids do these things, and wonders if they are signs he is sending to her, from wherever he is, to tell her he’s okay.

The only reason she even entertains the idea that they’re signs, is because these things, like the condolences of those who knew them, grow fewer and fewer as the years go on. Sirius and Remus hardly visit anymore, mumbling apologies and saying that it’s too much as they avoid eye contact, and Lily wonders if it’s because they simply don’t remember what Harry smelled like anymore, or the stupid jokes James would tell every morning to get a laugh out of her. 

Does it not strike them that Lily wakes up to ghosts and goes to bed beside one every night? Does it not strike them that, maybe, it’s too much for her too?

Or, she wonders one night, as she leaves the half-done crossword on the couch (“for James”, her mind supplies, even though James hasn’t finished the crossword she’s left out for him in nearly a decade), is it _because_ it’s too much for her? Are they scared of the fact that she still lives with their memories? Are they scared of the fact that James’ shirts still hang on one side of her closet, although much more neatly than they would have if he was alive? Are they scared of the fact that there are still clothes that would fit an eighteen month old in a small plastic box beneath her bed?

Maybe, her conscience, which sounds more and more like James with every passing day, says, you’re trying too hard to hold on to what your life could’ve been.

Ten years to the day, she attends her first support group meeting.

“Hi”, she says, tentatively, scanning the room. The war has not left her without scars, and Lily still feels the need to check the room for possible danger, for dangerous faces and threats, so long after Voldemort’s fall. Her wand, a stick she carries around for sentimental value, sits heavy in the bottom of her purse. She hasn't used it in years. “I’m Lily Evans. My husband and son died in a freak accident about ten years ago. And I still miss them every day. I can’t see little boys without thinking of mine, and—and—" Her voice breaks slightly, but she keeps going. "My husband is-- He was just… I miss them both, I miss them so much.” 

The people around her nod and smile apologetically, some offering whispered words of encouragement, and she finally feels like she’s understood. As they speak, she realizes that all of these people have stories like hers, that they are all missing someone every second of every day, that they all carry the weight of people, of lives that should’ve been, on their shoulders like she does.

“When does it stop hurting?” Lily asks an older lady, Edith, whose son has been gone for nearly ten years, same as hers. The difference was that Lily’s son wasn’t even one and a half, that Harry could only say his name and about twelve other words, and Edith’s son was a college student who drank far too much one night and made the mistake of getting behind the wheel of his friend’s car. She had so many more memories with her son than Lily did, and Lily is bitter for a moment, before she sees the sadness in the Edith’s eyes. Lily knows that sadness.

“It doesn’t stop, dear.” She says, kindly, and Lily’s heart breaks a little more, not just for herself, but for this other woman as well, another mother without her son. “It just becomes… different, after awhile.”

Lily wonders what Edith meant by different, and her schedule adjusts to allow for those meetings. She teaches her science class in the mornings and afternoons, and starts meeting Sirius and Remus in coffee shops (never at the same time, because she’s fairly certain they don’t speak to each other) like they used to years ago, before the war changed them all. And, one week a night, she shares her memories of Harry and James with people who know the pain that comes with just saying their names, some days.

One day, as she gets in the car, a smile on her face, she realizes that she hadn’t thought of Harry yet that day. She’d gone through attendance without her heart squeezing at the names of the Harrys in her class, and she’d not given a second thought to it. She doesn’t know how she drives to the community center building, but once she’s parked the car, she starts bawling. Have they forgotten her? Will they forgive her for this? She is supposed to remember them. She is supposed to hold them close to her and not let go, the way everyone else has.

One of the men in the group, Richard (sixty-two, lost his teenage son in a boating accident twenty years ago) spots her red eyes, when she comes in, and wraps his arms around her. “You’ve hit the one day mark, haven’t you?” He asks, after he lets go. “That’s the hardest one of the lot, in my opinion.”

“Are there others?” Lily asks, and Richard shrugs.

“There are if you want them to be.” He says, and Lily nods, taking it to heart.

“I’m sorry.” She says aloud, to James and Harry, when she gets home that night. She imagines them sitting on the couch, James sprawled along its length, glasses slipping down his nose as he pretends to sleep, while Harry sits on his legs, smiling over at her. She is glad, so glad, that they have each other, but she wishes they were here, with her, so that all three of them could be together. From what the others in the group say, that never fades. “I love you both. I love you so much. All the time, every day. I just… I just have to let go of you a bit, I think. I don’t love either of you any less. It just… it has to happen, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” 

A yellow butterfly, the same kind Harry used to watch through the windows in Godric’s Hollow, flutters by the kitchen window, and Lily knows that her boys are okay, wherever they are, and that they want her to be okay too.

Two months later, she donates most of Harry’s baby clothes, keeping just a few of the more sentimental things for herself. A few weeks after that, when she feels ready for a big change, most of James’ things go too, but not before she lets Sirius take something for himself. He seems thankful, Sirius, a little lighter on his feet, and Lily smiles when he folds up a t-shirt, the matching set to which he has at home, and waves to her before walking out of her bedroom. She knows James would've wanted her to take better care of Sirius than she has, and maybe he won't mind if she starts a little late.

She folds up the clothes she’s kept, puts them in a corner of the closet, and reaches out to touch them sometimes, as a reminder that her boys were real, that they wore these clothes and stole her heart and lived. It’s a reminder that their lives were meaningful, that they truly did do something. 

It hurts a little less now, when she sees little boys on the street. She wonders, from time to time, what Harry would be doing, and what James would look like now, but it is less a painful thought that keeps her in bed for days on end and more the way you would wonder about a friend you haven’t seen in awhile.

“You’ve got me for seven lifetimes, babe.” She remembers James saying, early in their marriage. She can almost feel the warm weight of him beside her, and she reaches out without thinking, profoundly disappointed when her arm sweeps through empty air. But still, she can hear his voice in her ear, and it lessens the blow of it. “For both of us, I hope this is number one.”

“Me too.” Lily says aloud, feeling suddenly lighter, as she looks around the room. She looks down at her hands, and the newspaper in them, and realizes she’s completed the crossword alone. “I hope so too.” Hope fills her chest with a fuzzy, orange warmth, which spreads to her fingertips and toes, lighting her up from the inside. 

Things are different now, she thinks, as she lays the newspaper down on the coffee table, and she feels better. She hopes that they are too. She looks over at the couch, thinks of a father and son roughhousing on it like they used to on the floor of the house they both died in, and knows that, wherever they are, they’ll be fine without her for now. And, just maybe, she will be fine without them for now too.

“I’m counting on you to keep that promise.” She says aloud, before the heater, which she’d turned on nearly ten minutes ago, shudders to life, warmth seeping into the room. It brings a smile to her face. “Alright, then. I’ll be seeing you. Both of you.”

And, years later, two children meet, and lifetime number two truly begins.


End file.
